Tobia on New Methods on Statutory Interpretation @kevin_tobia @GeorgetownLaw

Kevin Tobia, Georgetown University Law Center; Georgetown University Department of Philosophy, has published New Methods in Statutory Interpretation: Surveys, Corpus Linguistics, ChatGPT. Here is the abstract.

We live in an age of statutes, and textualism is the dominant method of interpreting them. This much is now familiar, encapsulated by Justice Kagan's 2015 announcement that "we are all textualists now." But this story has a recent twist: Textualism's methods are evolving. This short essay introduces some recent developments in textualist methods. Textualists are looking to corpus linguistics, surveys, and even large language models (e.g ChatGPT) to determine the meaning of statutory text. At the same time, textualists grow more skeptical about the force of some traditional methods: dictionaries, substantive canons, and even linguistic canons.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.